Well, it looks like it was more about proximity between the 2 routers. I moved to a new location (despite a female voice in my ear screaming opposition) and I was able to go from 1/0.5 to 3.5/1.0 which will be much better for potential VOIP use in that remote area.
Channels didn't seem to matter much and ultimately I ended up back at channel 6 again. It seemed to consistently have best results so I'm just gonna stick with 6 for now.
So if your WDS setup is losing too much bandwidth at the 2nd router, try putting the routers closer together if possible & test to see if that's the issue.
:smileywink: